Farm as Community: Growing Belonging with Abel Pearson and Morag Gamble

In this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World, I sit down with Abel Pearson – permaculture educator, community food grower and co founder of Glasbren, an award winning community-supported agriculture project in rural Wales.

Glasbren began as a three acre permaculture designed market garden and has now moved to Lord’s Park Farm, a 134 acre National Trust property on the cliffs where the Taf and Tywi rivers meet the sea in Carmarthenshire.

Abel and his family are the first permaculture based tenants on a National Trust farm, creating a flagship project for nature friendly, community facing farming.

In our conversation we explore:

• Abel’s journey from woofing and natural building to discovering permaculture as “the origin” of everything he now does
• How Glasbren grew from a three acre CSA into a whole farm vision at Lord’s Park
• Designing a landscape and an organisation with permaculture ethics: earth care, people care, fair share
• Indigenous and historic food systems as deeply “permacultural” ways of living in reciprocity with land
• Beingof a place when you may not be from there – and how growing food together becomes daily practice in belonging
• Welsh language, culture and land 
• Community supported agriculture, food security and the fragility of our current food system
• Wales’ shift toward agroecology, social value payments for farms, and support for small scale growers
• The practicalities of funding and holding a diversified social enterprise farm
• Volunteering at Glasbren as a pathway into community, wellbeing and climate action
• Family life in the middle of a farm that is also a community hub

Abel’s reflections weave beautifully with the core of permaculture education – that we are learning a way of seeing and relating, not just a collection of techniques. This episode is an invitation to slow down, listen to place, and see farms and gardens as sites of cultural and ecological repair.

Glasbren website: https://www.glasbren.org.uk

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This podcast is hosted by Morag Gamble, founder of the Permaculture Education Institute, where she mentors people to design and teach permaculture in their own unique contexts.

Morag has been asking a central question for thirty years: How are we to live? These podcast conversations are part of her ongoing attempt to think that through in public, in community, with people who care.

Morag is also host of the Ethos Fellowship, Ethos Foundation, International Permaculture Festival of Wild Ideas, steward of Fritjof Capra's international Alumni Network, and member of the Ecocivilistation Coalition.

Discover Morag's permaculture design and teaching courses here.

If this episode meant something to you, share it with one person who needs it. That is how good ideas travel.

Morag records from her solar-powered studio in a permaculture ecovillage on Jinibara & Gubbi Gubbi country.

Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/moraggamble/
Website: https://permacultureeducationinstitute.org/podcast/
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